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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16303 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
David Mitchell's second novel, number9dream, uses a similar episodic format to his brilliant but fragmentary debut Ghostwritten to create a more coherent and assured narrative that is part detective, part coming-of-age, story. Eiji Miyake, 20, naïve and wholly loveable, encounters a frantic, exotic world when he comes to Tokyo from his small island home to find the father he has never met.

Pin-stripped drones, a lip-pierced hairdresser, midday drunks ... Not a single person is standing still ... a thousand faces per minute ... oven-hot ... ready to buckle under the weight of cloud at any moment.

Eiji is a dreamer, a Billy Liar for the Cyberpunk generation. His fantasies structure this frenetic kaleidoscopic narrative, conducting the reader on an exhilarating, disorientating tour of metropolis and mind. One minute Eiji is contending with arcade-game cybourgs, the next caught up in a Blue Velvet-type nightmare with real-life (perhaps) gangsters: "dragged into a turf war between wolves with rabies". So what was crazed and charming becomes dangerous and gripping.

This exotica and cyber-unreality allow more traditional novelistic concerns--a boy's coming of age, the exploration of ethical responsibilities or the great human universals of love and duty--to creep up unobtrusively. Pretty soon the realisation dawns: this isn't just fun, this isn't just clever, this is a great, perhaps a very great, novel. A Joycean delight in language and parody combines with affectionate characterisation and an impressive narrative control to make number9dream an extraordinary and rewarding experience. --Robert Mighall

Andrew Davies, Big Issue
‘Dangerously addictive'

Review
'Even more dazzling than GHOSTWRITTEN' (Matt Thorne, Independent on Sunday )

'I haven't enjoyed a novel so much in ages; wild, bristling with strangeness' (Independent Books of the Year )

'Exceptional . . . more than a surreal detective story or coming-of-age novel, more than a portrait of Tokyo or stream of adolescent consciousness, it is unique: clever, unusual, gripping and beautifully written' (Literary Review )

'Resounds to the same marvellous chatter of voices that marked out GHOSTWRITTEN, his outstanding first novel' (Observer )

'Spellbinding' (Boyd Tonkin, Independent Books of the Year )

'A delirious mix of thriller, tragedy, fantasy, video games and a portrait of uneasy modern Japan . . . A deserving Booker nominee.' (Guardian )

'Wildly inventive' (Sunday Times )

'Captures aspects of modern Japan with a compelling authenticity and beauty' (Daily Telegraph )

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Customer Reviews

hard to get into........but worth it in the end
This is the last of David Mitchell's current output I have read. After being utterly enamoured by 'Cloud Atlas', 'Ghostwritten' and 'Black Swan Green' I was really looking forward to this. I'd have to say though that this is the hardest read of Mitchell's four books. The other three really WERE "unputdownable" but this one I had to give up on half way through and come back to it after a few weeks.

The central figure of the book is Eiji Miyake, a kid from the sticks, and his adventures in the Tokyo metropolis. He arrives in Tokyo on a mission to find his biological father, having lost his twin sister in an accident and been abandoned by his mother. The book tells the story of his seven weeks in Tokyo. The narrative employs Mitchell's trademark magical realism to illustrate Eiji's travails.

Like all of Mitchell's other works, 'Number9dream' is best seen as a collection of tales rather than an uninterrupted story. It flits between reality and Eiji's imagination with ease. I found this fine for the first part of the book but I got lost in the chapter "Study of Tales". For the first time reading Mitchell I didn't get the point! I still don't know what the stories Eiji was reading here were about. Perhaps I'm just not perceptive enough, but this felt like a little bit of Emperor's New Clothes. Hate to be too critical but there you are!

The rest of the book is thoroughly enjoyable and I'm glad I read it. I particularly liked the Yakuza sequences. Very violent, very Manga. The chapter describing the war diaries of Eiji's great uncle was also very well written.

A good book but not as good as the rest of David Mitchell's work. If you're coming to him fresh read 'Cloud Atlas' or 'Ghostwritten' first.

Loses the plot occasionally but enjoyable nonetheless
I don't remember ever having read another book that left me thrilled, disappointed, tempted to skip a few pages and unwilling to put it down, all at the same time. The first 20 pages or so had me hooked as the "Billy Liar for the cyber-punk generation" led me on one wild goose chase after another. OK, I couldn't expect David Mitchell to keep that up for a whole novel but there was disappointment and a feeling that the book had broken its promise when the thrills and spills of these fantasies came to an end.
And I am so relieved to read that other reviewers had problems with the "goatwriter" bits and pieces. What was that all about? It left me cold and reminded me of a poor attempt to rework Murakami Haruki's "Hard-boiled Wonderland" (see comments below). Nice enough but unnecessary and distracting.
And the Murakami references...once more I agree with the reader who says that there are similarites between this novel and "Wind-up Bird Chronicle". Unfortunately, I saw too much Murakami in "Number9dream" and not enough Mitchell; having read all of Murakami's work, to read the second-half (in particular) of this novel felt like covering old ground.
In short, this is an enjoyable novel and well-worth a read but fails to deliver all it promises in the first dazzling pages. Would give it three and a half stars if possible but no can do... so 3 it is.

Fizzing, multitextured, overwhelming and human story
In Ghostwritten Mitchell excelled when confronted with the Other; in the superb opening tale of a Japanese subway bombing, or the epic story of a soul's journey through many hosts in its search for its origin. That novel failed when the basic components were familiar, when the plot and characters occupied recognisable spaces, and when Mitchell overreached in terms of the variety of tales he told. In Number9dream the book achieves a degree of unity - it basically follows the story of a young man looking for his father in Tokyo, this plotline interrupted, delayed, sped up and dropped by other voices and stories that want to be heard. Tokyo is described in terms of an opaque, fast, towering underworld, a reference to the subterranean region of the mind accessible through dreams. Therefore, as Eiji experiences a psychological resolution to his quest, by returning to his starting point, can Tokyo's complex, overwhelming landscape be razed to the ground. The novel is verbally lush, some sections extraordinary (the double date, the kaiten pilot's diary), whereas some parts are weaker, owing again to familiarity (movie-ish false start opening chapter) or overreaching in style (the goatwriter sections). However, it is a beautiful book, full of amusing, lovely, believable and complicated characters, and Eiji as protagonist reacts always with a reassuring lack of pretension to the mad, unreal reality that he occupies in the loud, overcrowded city.